The Ropemaker, Emsworth

As I have surely said on this blog plenty of times over the years, I will never go to any holiday or short trip without at least one meal booked that stands a better than average chance of being decent. This is partly just for the sheer joy of eating out (how sad must your life be if you don't like eating out) but particularly in the case of European trips, there's a pretty good chance the weather will be awful (and don't think even Spain avoids this - it rained for days on end during recent trips to Seville and Girona) so I need an indoor activity to escape to.

And it's just as well the Ropemaker turned out to be as good as it did, because the weather last week in Emsworth was utterly biblical. I foolishly left the dry, comfortable hotel room with only an umbrella and by the time I'd got the 20 min or so down the road to what I'm going to call the Old Town (I'm not sure what locals call it) my jeans and shoes were absolutely soaked through due to horizontal driving rain. After sitting in the Blue Bell nursing a pint and a crab sandwich for as long as it took to stop dripping onto the floor beneath me, which was a surprisingly long time, I reluctantly headed out again into the squall and got soaked to the bone all over again. As I said, it really is just as well the Ropemaker turned out to be good.

This was apparently the first day of a new menu, and though I was slightly disappointed to see they'd taken off their "famous" (as much as anywhere can be famous for anything after only being open 2 months) Bouillabaisse, there was still plenty of things you'd want to eat. This is a cheese soufflé which held a great shape thanks to a gently firm crust, and was lovely and fluffy inside. The cheese sauce was good too - silky smooth and not too overwhelming or too underpowered.

Crab and sweetcorn bites had a great texture and plenty of good crab flavour. Perhaps if I was going to nitpick I'd say they probably didn't need all three of guacamole, apple and pear chutney AND brown crab mayonnaise (the mayo and the chutney would have been more than enough) but I mean, who doesn't like guacamole anyway.

I've had enough bad examples of duck over the years (mealy and dry, overcooked and tough, or cold and flabby) to know that despite appearances it's pretty bloody easy to get wrong. The bird here was fantastic - so tender you could cut it with a spoon but with a defined golden brown skin from careful rendering. The veg selection was all soaked in one of those lovely thick, dark Madeira sauces and carbs came in the form of a neat square of crisp and creamy Dauphinoise potato.

I never got to try the rump steak as it disappeared so quickly, but I assume that's a good sign. It certainly looked accurately rare, and the chips were good and crunchy (although, inevitably, I'd have preferred them peeled). One of the balancing acts somewhere like the Ropemaker has to pull off is keep their traditional local customer base happy but also have enough elsewhere going on to make the journey worthwhile for a curious visiting restaurant enthusiast. And judging by the fact every table in this huge restaurant (and more or less every spot in the huge bar) was taken on a cold, wet Wednesday night is proof that they've hit upon a formula that works. PS. Ignore the photo above, we ate early and this was taken when we first arrived

Desserts were equally accomplished. Bramley apple and cranberry crumble was easily enjoyable, not too sweet or sour, and with a nice buttery crumb. And Pistachio soufflé (the second soufflé on the menu) looked and tasted the part too. We didn't order the cheese, but the tasteful mix of English (Ogleshield,Shropshire Blue) and French (Coulommiers, Couronne Cendrée) names means someone at the Ropemaker knows their cheese.

So who cares about weather, if it just means more of an excuse to stay for longer holed up somewhere like the Ropemaker and get stuck in. As I said, it's already a wildly popular place despite the slightly out-of-town location, so they hardly need my help putting the word out, but I'm happy to report that my night's stay here was extremely lovely (the bed in particular was incredibly comfy, I slept like a log) and I'd recommend it to anyone. Rain or shine.

8/10

I was invited to the Ropemaker and didn't see a bill for dinner, though we paid for our drinks at the bar separately. Visit their website for prices.

The Lanesborough Grill, Belgravia

One of the side effects of writing a restaurant blog for as long as I have, aside from an ever-increasing waistline, is that you often end up revisiting the same sites as they go through various different incarnations. I first visited the grand dining hall of the Lanesborough hotel all the way back in 2011 when it went by the name Apsley's and was serving (despite the very English name) a pricey - even for 2011 - menu of Italian fine dining. I remember one of the starters arriving on nine separate plates, but not much else, which probably tells you everything you need to know.

After that it became Celeste, where the vast space became increasingly untroubled by customers and earned the nickname Marie Celeste. I remember being one of two tables taken on a Saturday lunchtime, eating another fairly unmemorable lunch of posh Italian dishes. Celeste wasn't a bad restaurant as such, and it is certainly true that finding the right kind of operation to sit comfortably in a 5-star hotel is no easy task, but I don't think I've ever really been delighted to pay over £30 for a plate of pasta regardless of how plush the carpets are.

Anyway it's third time lucky for the Lanesborough - at least I imagine they hope it is - with their flagship restaurant now being called the Lanesborough Grill. As the name suggests, the new menu has much more in common with the grand old tradition of London hotel restaurants (think the Dorchester or the Ritz) than the pretensions of Italian fine dining, and although it's certainly not cheap, starters of £20-ish and mains of £40-ish mean that your final bill will be less disastrous than if you had the full Antipasti - Primi - Secondi - Dulci palava.

The house bread at the Lanesborough is extremely good, a quartered sourdough bun served with a generous puck of salted butter. It's details like this that separate the good from the best of fine dining kitchens, and while the ability to bake bread this good may be increasingly common it's never a trivial thing to achieve.

Octopus was very nicely grilled, with crispy bits of charred tentacle contrasting nicely with the meaty, tender flesh inside. The seafood came arranged inside a kind of chunky salad of Jersey potatoes and sea kale, a remarkably successful pairing. Best of all though was a white almond 'gazpacho' serving as a sauce, bringing a touch of Mediterranean flair to the plate.

Orkney scallop was, in its favour, vast - a ludicrously outsized example whose shell must have been the size of a kitchen table. I still maintain that a cooked scallop is generally nicer to eat than raw, and this was very much raw, dressed simply in tomato and rapeseed oil, but it was clearly an excellent specimen and they'd obviously decided to mess about with it too much would have a detrimental effect. Not my dish, but I didn't hear any complaints.

Next a little interstatial course of buttermilk-fried quail, the coating puffed up with I think rice or oats to great effect. It came on a bed of mushrooms and spring onions and one of those lovely dark green vegetal oils, and was a lovely, earthy counterpoint to the quail.

We hardly needed any more carbs given the main course was going to be a giant pie, but I was intrigued by the idea of hash browns with cheese and so wanted to see what would turn up. These neat little cubes of fried potato had a lovely crunch but added to the usual diced potato filling was a delirious slick of melted goat's cheese, an idea so simple and yet so good I'm surprised I've not stumbled upon it before.

But yes if a menu contains beef Wellington, I'm going to need a very good reason not to order it, and so with no such reasons obvious, order it I did. Presented whole and sliced theatrically tableside, it was an extremely good example of its kind, with beef cooked to medium rare, and a pastry casing not too think or soggy. The sauce was a lovely salty, glossy creation that tasted like it had taken someone a good deal of time and care to get right, and with the Wellington itself came a nice meaty slice of hen-of-the-woods mushroom, another thing I always look for on menus when the season's right. As a nicely generous touch they left us the largely meat-free 'ends' of the Wellingdon, but by this point thanks to over-feeding on that excellent bread and the irresistable cheesey hash browns, we were in no position to make any use of them. Still, nice touch.

Desserts were geometrically beautiful and enormous fun to eat, in the finest London 5-star hotel restaurant tradition. Glazed caramel white chocolate with Poire William was every bit as good as that sounds, with some excellent texture contrasts. And a little brioche pudding flavoured with "burnt orange purée" was also superb, its "milk ice cream" rich and smooth and buttery.

As I mention above, I was no fan of Apsley's or Celeste and accepted an invite to the latest incarnation more in hope than expectation. But the new "posh British" menu sits far, far better in this lovely room than the fussy, faintly pretentious Italian concept it replaces. No, it's not quite the Ritz, but then where is - I enjoyed my meal here far more than for example the Foyer restaurant at Claridge's which is probably its closest competitor. Sometimes, you just want to sit down in gloriously upholstered surroundings and order three courses of skilful, attractive takes on the classics, which is exactly what the Lanesborough Grill delivers in spades. Let's hope this version finds an audience and outlasts both of its predecessors and more.

8/10

I was invited to the Lanesborough Grill and didn't see a bill. Expect to pay about £100/head with a couple of glasses of wine.

Galvin Bar & Grill at the Kimpton, Bloomsbury

In an ideal world, the grand dining room of a five star hotel in central London would guarantee a wonderful time, a special occasion destination restaurant where you forget your troubles, open your wallet and bathe in the splendour of a world-class hospitality team at the top of their game. The reality is that all too often, bogged down by large, unfocussed menus that try to be all things to all people and that require a kitchen to twist in a hundred different directions at once, hotel restaurants can be remarkably hit and miss. For every Ritz Restaurant (still the absolute peak of hotel dining in the capital) there's somewhere serving a sausagey £25 burger or over-battered fish and chips, and even some of the most respected names can still occasionally get it wrong.

When the Kimpton first opened, their flagship restaurant was the Neptune, somewhere you could order a seafood platter for a pretty-reasonable-actually £38 but which didn't really stand alongside the best places in town and didn't quite set pulses racing. They also committed the unforgivable sin (at least in my opinion) of having shells of interesting creatures like spider crabs and razor clams decorating the raw bar that weren't available to order on the menu. Anyway that's now gone, and in its place in the same glitzy room have arrived the Galvin brothers who know a thing or two about making hotel restaurants work.

And one glance at the menu is enough to reassure that you're in safe hands. The Galvin style is very much "British with a hint of French", meaning things like cottage pie and Dover sole but also their signature Tarte Tatin. Think the Ivy, only good (look, I'm sure you did have a lovely time at the Ivy but I'm also sure it wasn't anything to do with the food). Even house bread is a cut above - this lovely warm sourdough was spiked with Marmite, lending its sticky crumb a pleasant kick of umami.

Crab (from Dorset) came with a neat layer of spiced brown meat on top of a good thick amount of fresh white, and was absolutely everything you'd ever want from a crab starter. And though focussing too much on the prices at a place like this is probably a bad idea overall, I think £16 for this generous amount of hand-picked crab (I even found a teeny bit of shell, so you could tell they'd started with the full animals) isn't bad at all.

In a starter that contains salmon and caviar, why list it on the menu with the title "potato"? Because this was no ordinary potato starter. Even their description of "Warm potato pancake" only goes so far in describing what is one of the more exciting things I've eaten involving the humble spud. More accurately described maybe as a sort of potato mousse, it was so light and fluffy and deliriously richly flavoured that it absolutely lived up to its top billing - the (lovely actually) salmon and caviar and crème fraîche were merely supporting artists to an absolute star of a main ingredient. This was a really exceptional thing, an absolute must-order.

But the fun didn't end there - Dover sole was literally perfect, gently bronzed with butter and with the flesh lifting easily off the bone in solid, meaty fillets. Capers - plenty of them - lightened the load of the butter and there was a torched half of lemon to add any more citrus as required but really you didn't need any distractions from the sole itself, a breathtaking bit of fish.

I'm told the steak offering at Galvin will vary slightly with availability; on this particular evening the only one served on the bone was fillet, so that's the one I had to go for. It may be entirely psychological but I always think steak on the bone is far more interesting with a greater range of textures, and there's a huge amount of fun to be had picking at bones. This particular fillet was - as I'm sure you can tell even from my slightly murky photo - beautifully cooked, with a good dark char and fantastic grass-fed flavour. Accompaniments, including superb fries and a classy béarnaise, were also all faultless.

Tarte tatin, as is usual from a Galvin restaurant, was brilliantly crunchy and sticky and just on the right side of being so sugary you could develop some serious long term condition from taking a second bite. It came with 'clotted cream ice cream' in case you were worried pastry soaked in sugar was a little too worthy.

But best of the desserts was bread and butter pudding "Gary Rhodes", a fitting tribute to the great man as this was just wonderful. Surprisingly easy to eat given the amount of double cream and butter it must contain, with a good amount of vanilla adding an important extra layer of luxury, it was about as far from the a tinned school meal as it was possible to imagine. Genuinely brilliant.

I've been using a lot of superlatives, I know, I'm sorry. The fact is it's so nice to be out somewhere like the Kimpton and eating food like this, that it's hard not to get just a bit carried away. I'll try, though, for the sake of objectivity. Firstly yes, it's pricey - not stupidly so, but £51 is a lot to pay for a 300g steak on the bone, and I think with the obligatory glass of champagne and bottle of wine the bill for two people would be north of £100/head. You can certainly pay the same for worse, but this is not an every day spend. And secondly, and I'm really clutching at straws here thinking of anything that's much of a negative, this huge room does need quite a few people to "come alive", and earlier in the evening with only one or two tables taken it felt a bit soulless. By the time we left though it was buzzing.

And that's really all I have to complain about. Everywhere else where it counts, from the slick service to attractive, accessible menu to the mature, confident dishes themselves, Galvin Bar & Grill delivers in spades, a gleaming, grown-up operation that exudes class and style from the first jolly welcome to the final wave goodbye. Plenty have tried and failed in spaces such as these, but when it works the marriage of glamorous surroundings, attentive front of house and seriously good food is utterly beguiling, enough to make you wonder why there isn't one of these in every 5* in town. The Galvins have hit upon a formula here that puts plenty of other - in fact most other - hotel restaurants to shame, and whats more have the cheek to make the whole thing look easy. It may not, in fact, be easy, but you can let them worry about details like that. All you need to do is bring a wallet and an empty stomach, and they'll take care of the rest.

9/10

I was invited to Galvin Bar & Grill and didn't see a bill.

The Foyer & Reading Room at Claridge's, Mayfair

There's a strange kind of light in the Claridge's Foyer restaurant, a sort of otherworldly greenish hue that appears to have no obvious source. There's green detailing in the carpets and and upholstery but certainly not so much that it could create such an odd effect, and examination of the table lamps and ceiling lights positioned around the room appear to just be the normal shade of electric yellow. It's not an unpleasant experience sat in here - far from it - but the soft furnishings and tinkle of the grand piano combined with the bizarre green fug combines to create a slightly out-of-body experience, like you're living in a flashback sequence from an old VHS movie.

In this rarefied if rather discombobulating space, impeccably smart staff seem to fade entirely in and out of existence as and when required - if you need your glass refilling they are there and in the blink of an eye, and then a moment later gone again, leaving you the space to yourself. You should expect a front-of-house of this standard at places (and prices) like these but even so, experiencing international-level service first-hand is never anything less than a thrill, and watching how they dealt with the odd issue that cropped up during the dinner was a masterclass in grace and efficiency.

And yes, I had a couple of issues with my dinner at the Foyer but it's important that all these niggles come in the context of a serious restaurant serving serious food at serious prices, and I'm only pointing them out in the spirit of completeness and the fact that really, at this level, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect something approaching perfection from your dinner.

Speaking of perfection though, the house bread was exactly that - an absolutely stonking sourdough with a moist, warm, tacky interior and a delicate thin crust. How much better to be served a generous chunk of this beautiful rustic creation than some frou-frou cones of ciabatta or oil-soggy foccacia. Full marks for technique and sensibility.

How odd, then, that a kichen that at first seemed so fully in control of its baking abilities should produce these rather lacklustre gougere. They weren't awful, just disappointing - cold, slightly chewy pastry containing a mealy filling of very little flavour, and a world apart from the stunning versions served at the Ritz. And I'm allowed to compare Claridge's with the Ritz, surely?

Lobster bisque needed a bit more salt and a lot more seafood flavour - it could have passed as a tomato soup were it not for the chunks of lobster floating around in it - but I'm still easily able to enjoy a slightly-seafoody tomato soup, and the tortellini were marvellously delicate and light. But again, for comparison, try the version at Sheekey's - much more my kind of thing.

I didn't get to try any of the steak tartare but it certainly looked the part, and the person whose dish it was had ordered it before, so that sounds like a recommendation to me. Like the use of variagated leaves, too.

Tuna tartare was a hugely generous portion, particularly regarding the tuna which arrived in inch-thick cubes piled high over thinly-sliced heritage tomatoes in a nice sharp dressing. OK, this is not the most radical combination of ingredients in the world but a hotel restaurant, even one as illustrious as Claridge's Foyer, isn't about shocking with unusual techniques or flavours (you can leave that to Davis & Brook next door) but serving familiar things as well as they can be served. And I would say the tuna tartare fit that bill.

Rack of lamb was so cleanly, precisely cooked to a uniform pink that they gleamed on the plate, bathed in their own crimson light in contrast to the irridescent glow of the peas and broad beans beneath. And they came with a little jug of dangerously addictive glossy lamb jus, with a texture cleverly thick enough to cling seductively to the meat even when piping hot.

Beef fillet was - eventually - similarly well-received, but I'm afraid they needed a two runs to get this right. The first example, ordered medium-rare, arrived cooked to grey all the way to the centre, an unforgiveable error for your average high street steakhouse never mind a leading hotel of the world. But hey, these things happen to the best of us, and the staff were so apologetic and made things right so comprehensively that it was almost worth the initial disappointment just to see a world-class front of house flex its hospitality muscles. It was replaced, taken off the bill, and all the sides it was ordered with replaced too, so that they didn't go cold. Top work.

All the sides - and boy did we go for it on this front - were perfect. Mashed potato was correctly 90% butter, dauphinoise had a lovely balance between dairy and starch and a golden crust on top like a creme brulée, and chips were crunchy and moreish in the steakhouse style.

I was kicking myself I didn't have room for dessert, but all those various forms of carbohydrates defeated us, and so we filled the time with a digestif instead - in this case a couple of espresso martinis and a Manhattan. The bar work at Claridge's is, as you might rightly expect, some of the best in town, and it's not for no reason they're already back operating at capacity, their clientele (which included me earlier on that evening) spilling over not only onto the new outdoor terrace but to the bar area of Davis and Brook. It is genuinely heartwarming to see them back, and so popular.

As for the Foyer restaurant, well, I had a lovely evening and more than enough went right to make the journey worthwhile, but for an establishment that so often strives for perfection in everything they do, and usually succeeds, it felt like a step behind the rest of their offerings. Compared to the cocktail bars and even the afternoon tea served in the same room (which, by the way, is utter perfection from start to finish), it just wasn't quite there.

But anyway, it's still great to be out and about, and lovely to see the old girl lit up and full of happy punters again. A visit to Claridge's is still, as it ever was, a privilege, and I will be back as soon and as often as my wallet will allow.

7/10

The Bull & Bear, Manchester

Bull and Bear is... well, actually, I don't know what it is. I don't even think the Bull & Bear knows what it is. The name suggests a pub, another addition to the North West's phalanx of world-class boozers, except this one is set up in the grand dining hall of the new Stock Exchange hotel, with its soaring ceilings, elaborate plasterwork and plush leather seating, and feels about as much like a normal pub as does the restaurant at Claridge's. There are, admittedly - and hilariously - flatscreen TVs all around the room showing Sky Sports, but none of the seating really face them, the sound is on too low to hear anyway (thank God) and halfway through our lunch the satellite signal failed, so they just started showing powerpoint slides of the hotel rooms upstairs.

If you're wondering what kind of person thinks putting Sky Sports on the walls in the dining room of a five star hotel is a good idea, well the answer is Gary Neville, Ryan Giggs and Winston Zahra, Premier League footballers being about the demographic in the world unable to really enjoy their £9.50 pollock scotch egg without the footie on in the background. The whole venture, in fact, feels very much like Kerridge with his successful restaurant brain on was gamely pulling in one direction while Neville & Co were insisting that the menu should somehow involve a baked potato (£8.50, featuring raw steak; we weren't brave enough to try it), a Caesar salad and pints of lager on tap.

To his credit Kerridge has, thanks to his talent as a chef and experience in the field of fancy hotel restaurants (I believe his place in the Corinthia is lovely), put together a menu that tries its darndest to keep all these separate interests happy, and occasionally succeeds. The aforementioned fish scotch egg is, well, not a vast amount of food for £9.50 but seasoned properly and prettily presented even if the flavour was in the end a bit subdued.

Less successful was this dish they called a "cassoulet" but turned out to be nothing of the sort. There were no chunks of sausage, no tasty slabs of pork skin, no thick, buttery sauce around the beans and in fact if I hadn't have been told it had been cooked with pork fat could have easily assumed it was some kind of vegetarian stew. And there's nothing wrong with a vegetarian stew of course, I just hadn't ordered one, and even if I had the vast amount of truffle dumped on top could not distract from what was a rather ordinary, underseasoned bowl of food, containing strange cubes of pickled something-or-other (apple?) that just made the whole thing taste even more bizarre.

There were occasional glimpses of Kerridge's more celebrated work. Mussels Marinière with Warm Stout was a thick seafood mousse with a lovely deep malty stout flavour, studded with mussels and served with a warm bun similar to soda bread. Putting aside the obvious criticism that this was £11.50 for about three spoonfuls of food, it was declared "really good" and was about the only thing we'd order again if we were to return. Though that's a big "if".

Elsewhere, things continued to disappoint. In no universe I can think of can a single quail stuffed with black pudding cost £17.50, especially not one with dry breast meat, chewy skin (had it been standing around the pass too long?) and containing an unadvertised and unwelcome surprise of a mushy apricot I think it was in the centre, which oozed out as I cut into it like a lanced boil.

Chips were fine. I never really like the chunky wedge shape for my chips (Kerridge's Hand & Flowers in Marlow do dainty little tube-shaped chips, but has decided not to do that here for some reason) and the potato didn't have a great deal of flavour but they were, you know, OK. Plenty of them though (as you'd hope for £5.50), and just as well as even I with my pretty meagre appetite was beginning to panic that a single quail and some weird veg stew wasn't going to keep me going until dinnertime.

"Profiterole" disappointed in a similar way to the "cassoulet", insofar as they weren't really profiterole because they weren't made with choux pastry. Instead, some little pastry casings - brittle and savoury like crackers - were filled with sour vanilla cream and topped with an admittedly lovely caramel-chocolate sauce. They weren't horrible, just a bit like everything else - not quite as advertised, slightly underflavoured, and slightly mean-spirited for the price (£8.50).

It all added up (and thanks to a few glasses of wine it certainly bloody did add up, to around £60/head with service charge) to a very strange experience indeed. If ever world class service was needed to rescue a birthday lunch from the jaws of a mediocre menu it was now, and fortunately a familiar face I recognised from the launch team at Fera, Mayfair back in the day was on hand to ensure everything ran smoothly and our every whim was catered for in good time. Take a bow, that man. But otherwise, a pub that isn't a pub serving overthought and underpowered bistro food in a room that would be plush if it didn't have more 4K capability than the nearest branch of Dixons, does Manchester really need this? Does anywhere?

I guess it could have been worse. The big name chef originally slated to take over the space was Michael O'Hare, and lord knows how his sci-fi experimental Spanish/Japanese alien food would have coped with the expectations of an all-day bistro and the requirement to serve breakfast. Or maybe it would have been brilliant, I guess we'll never know. All I do know is that the Bull & Bear is not the vehicle for Kerridge's undoubted talents it could have been, and I honestly wonder how long his name will stay above the door. For now, put it to the back of your mind - go to Mana, or Sugo Pasta Kitchen, or Kala - and leave alone until they've decided what on earth they want to be. Life's too short for meat-free cassoulet.

5/10